About half a year ago, I heard this story that QWERTY keyboards (and their variants) were actually designed to slow down typists (to avoid typewriters getting stuck), contrary to the Dvorak layout, which was specifically designed for speed and comfort. After having learned to count binary on my hands (yes, you can count to 1023 using only your 10 fingers!), this seemed like another fun and freaky thing to learn, and this could actually prove to be useful over time. After all, I switched from AZERTY to QWERTY before, how hard could this be ? At least I was right about it being useful.

Good news to start the year: the new Psi Qt4 branch has been made public as a new year gift. Yes, another branch of Psi to keep track of, and I have a feeling that this won’t be the last one either ;). For those interested, I wrote something together about the new soon-to-be-mainline-development branch.

I finally got around to doing some more privacy list work for Psi. After porting what i had to our soon-to-be-released Qt4 branch, i even managed to add some more functionality. Basically, what I have so far can be seen here (minus the ‘Add’ button in the rules list).

As many of you know, Psi has been using Darcs for version controlling since the development of 0.10. However, although Darcs works on most platforms, some people have been experiencing problems with getting Darcs to work for them. Because of this, and some other inconveniences (not being able to checkout subdirectories of the development tree, long checkout times, the lack of a scalable web-interface, …), we have decided to create a Subversion mirror our development repository (using Tailor).

As Google released a new version of libjingle last friday, I decided to experiment with their file transfer implementation in Psi this weekend. I added some code that allows someone to accept files sent by Google Talk, and tested it with a few Google Talk contacts, with a perfect success rate (so far). For the brave who wish to experiment with this, see the instructions below. Note that this code is unofficial, untested, only uses a very rudimentary UI (there is no integration with the existing file transfers), still suffers from at least two bugs (on Mac OS X: one that segfaults when receiving images, and one where CPU skyrockets to 100% after a while, which we had with older libjingles as well), and has no support from the Psi developers whatsoever. Comments should therefore go directly to me.

Jason Kim, who previously designed the Psi logos and the Stellar iconset, has drawn a new Stellar icon. Combining his shiny icon with the overlays from the Crystal iconset resulted in the new Stellar3 iconset, which you can see in action below. The new iconset, which is still subject to small changes, has been added to the Psi mainline development branch.